Generally, an air conditioner is an apparatus configured to perform a cooling or heating cycle by cooling or heating indoor air according to user need.
Recently, technologies in which various functions such as dehumidification, humidification, air purification, and the like are added to an air conditioner to maintain comfortable indoor air according to change in season and user selection have been developed.
Such an air conditioner uses a refrigerant for cooling and dehumidification functions, and is recognized as a primary cause of ozone layer destruction and global warming due to leakage of the refrigerant. In consideration of problems of using such a refrigerant, energy ventilation apparatuses configured to reduce a ventilation load by transmitting sensible and latent heat between indoor air to be discharged and outdoor air to be introduced have been developed.
However, the conventional air conditioner has a collection rate of latent heat significantly lower than that of sensible heat. Therefore, there is a problem in that it is possible for the conventional air conditioner to not correspond to an increase in a cooling load. In consideration of the problems of such an energy air conditioner, a regenerative evaporative cooling technology has been developed.
The regenerative evaporative cooling technology decreases a temperature of air using water evaporation and cooling effects, and since the regenerative evaporative cooling technology does not use a refrigerant except water, problems of the conventional air conditioner may be solved, and thus there is an advantage in that a cooling load may be significantly reduced.
Such an evaporative cooler includes a configuration in which a wet channel and a dry channel are repeatedly formed and which exchanges heat through evaporation in the wet channel and supplies cooled air to an indoor area through the dry channel.
A conventional technology including the evaporative cooler was disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 10-1055668 (Core module for regenerative evaporative cooler and method for fabricating the same).
In addition, technologies combined with a cooling cycle technology for cycling a refrigerant have been developed to improve a cooling effect of the conventional evaporative cooler.
One example of such a conventional technology was disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 10-0947616 (Air conditioner). Although an air conditioner disclosed in Korean Patent Registration No. 10-0947616 has an advantage in that dehumidification and cooling are performed simultaneously, there is a problem in that indoor air is excessively dry when a dehumidifying and cooling operation is performed for a long time.
In addition, there is a problem in that a structure thereof becomes too complex when cooling, heating, ventilating, and humidity adjusting functions are all included in one air conditioner.